Computers beating humans at chess? Easy. Computers beating humans at Jeopardy? Unimaginably challenging–but an IBM supercomputer is now a really good (but not yet brilliant) Jeopardy player, and is gearing up to compete with human champions on TV. This New York Times piece by Clive Thompson on all this is among the best articles on technology you’ll read this year.
Author Archive | Harry McCracken
HP's Windows Slate PC: Not Officially Dead, But Dead
I’m at The Big Money’s Untethered conference–an event about tablets and the future of publishing–in New York. One of the speakers this morning was Phil McKinney, CTO of HP’s Personal Systems Group. The Big Money’s James Ledbetter interviewed him about tablets, and he talked about the downsides of using existing operating systems for new types of devices. (He didn’t mention Windows explicitly, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t talking about OS/2.) He also extolled the virtues of WebOS, which HP will own assuming its acquisition of Palm goes through.
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Want an iPhone 4? Get in Line
With recent Apple blockbusters like all the iPhones and the iPad, there’s been a useful secret shopping tip: If you wanted a product pronto but had an inexplicable resistance to waiting in a bizarrely long line, you could wait until early evening on launch day and then stroll into an Apple Store. By then, the throngs had dispersed, and the shelves were still well-stocked with shiny new gadgets.
(You could also order online and avoid a shopping trip altogether, of course, but I’ve always been impressed by the retail buyers who could resist temptation for just a few hours in return for hassle-free buying…)
With the iPhone 4, apparently, it’s not going to be like that. The phone is debuting on June 24th, but the black model is sold out for weeks, and the white one still hasn’t gone on sale at all:
Of course, it says the phone will ship by July 14th, so there’s some chance Apple will catch up with demand more quickly than that. But I wonder if it’s going to feel like there’s a great worldwide iPhone shortage for awhile?
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YouTube Adds a Video Editor
It’s not going to replace Premiere, Final Cut, or iMovie anytime soon. But YouTube has added a very basic Web-based editor–and given that some of us mostly do very basic video editing, it sounds handy.
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Memeo Connect's Take on the GDrive
Me
meo Connect, which my colleague David Worthington tried and liked a few weeks ago, is an app that lets Google Apps users sync their documents and other files to a PC or Mac so they can get access to them even when they’re offline. And as of today, it’s available in a beta of version 2.0, which lets you get at synced files not only in Memeo’s app but in Windows Explorer or the OS X finder, as well as in file open/save dialog boxes. The sync is two-way, so anything you drag or save into this repository gets moved back to Google Apps’ storage once you’re back online. And as before, Connect can handle files of all sorts and do conversions between Google Docs files and PDF and Microsoft Office formats.
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AT&T Presses Pause on iPhone Presales
Despite yesterday’s iPhone preordering meltdown, a heck of a lot of people reserved phoness. AT&T statement:
iPhone 4 pre-order sales yesterday were 10-times higher than the first day of pre-ordering for the iPhone 3G S last year. Consumers are clearly excited about iPhone 4, AT&T’s more affordable data plans and our early upgrade pricing.
Given this unprecedented demand and our current expectations for our iPhone 4 inventory levels when the device is available June 24, we’re suspending pre-ordering today in order to fulfill the orders we’ve already received.
The availability of additional inventory will determine if we can resume taking pre-orders.
In addition to unprecedented pre-order sales, yesterday there were more than 13 million visits to AT&T’s website where customers can check to see if they are eligible to upgrade to a new phone; that number is about 3-times higher than the previous record for eligibility upgrade checks in one day.
We are working hard to bring iPhone 4 to as many of our customers as soon as possible.
Ten times as many preorders as for the 3GS? Amazing. I’m still not a believer in “AT&T is locking people in to deny them the option of a Verizon iPhone that will be announced any day now” conspiracy theories, but that’s a lot of folks who are planning to be on AT&T through 2012…
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Swype for the Masses
One of the most essential pieces of software on my Droid is Swype, the astonishing–yes, astonishing–utility that lets you enter text by whipping your finger around the on-screen keyboard as fast as you can go. As long as your finger glides past the characters in the word you intend you’re good, and you don’t need to tap, tap, tap. But I’m one of the lucky few that the Swype folks have permitted to install the software: The company’s business model involves licensing the app to phone makers as a preinstalled feature.
Now TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington is reporting that Swype will be available as a download for Android phones, starting today. Wonderful news–I don’t claim that every owner of an Android phone will find it as indispensable as I do, but I do think every Android user should try it…
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Flock 3.0: The Social Browser Gets a Reboot
Half a decade ago, a startup called Flock was formed to build a “social browser” of the same name–a Web browser aimed at people who like to use the Web to share stuff and otherwise interact with other people. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but the road the product ended up taking has been uncommonly twisty.
The original preview version of Flock, based on the same Mozilla browser code as Firefox, debuted in 2005. (Back then, only students could join Facebook; Twitter didn’t exist, period.) The first beta, which appeared a leisurely two years later, was significantly different and better; I liked it so much it became my default browser. Version 2.0 improved on it further. But version 2.5, which appeared more than a year ago, was instantly obsolescent: It was based on Firefox 3.0 even though it appeared only shortly before Firefox 3.5 did, and there were rumors that Flock’s creators planned to dump Mozilla and move to Chromium, the open-source version of Google’s Chrome.
Fast forward to right now. It turns out that the rumors were true: Flock 3.0, which is now available as a beta download for Windows, is built on Chromium. Pretty much by definition, that means it’s significantly different from any version before it. But it turns out that the company hasn’t even tried to recreate the old Flock. This isn’t so much an upgrade as a reboot–an all-new answer to the question “What should a social browser be in 2010?”
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Failwhale Resurgent
Thanks in part to World Cup chatter, Twitter is having its worst reliability problems in months–but kudos to the company for acknowledging them with an unflinching honesty that’s rare in corporate communications of any sort.
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A Really Big Droid
Engadget’s Joanna Stern got her hands on Verizon’s upcoming, unannounced Droid X. With a 4.4″ display, it looks like a handful indeed, and a neat one–Verizon and Motorola’s answer to Sprint and HTC’s EVO 4G. I don’t expect supersized phone displays to completely take over–too many people want a smaller device-but I’d love to own a phone with one someday. Wonder if there’s even the slightest chance of Apple unveiling an iPhone 4XL?